Category Archives: Christian Discipleship

DRIVING LESSONS

It’s a rite of passage in our country– learning how to drive.  From the time I first became a teenager, I lived for getting my permit at age 15 and my license at 16.  It was the longest wait of my life. 

All my childhood I loved playing with little toy cars– the cheap ones made out of five inches of molded plastic.  My neighbor Cathy and I would play for hours with them, making roads in the dirt with our hands until our hands were raw and caked with red dirt.  It only took one summer rain shower to  obliterate our little homemade town of highways, streets, and driveways, but we were always eager to get back out there the next day and make new ones. When I was playing cars, I was driving those cars in my mind.

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GASP

Mark & Mike Sims enjoying an Auburn football game in 2015.

My brother, Dr. Mike Sims, has served as a family practice physician in Columbus, Georgia since the mid-1970’s.  For many years his practice included obstetrics– the delivery of babies.  Mike often expressed to me how much he enjoyed participating with God in the divine miracle of birth.  Mike has always been pro-life and has never wavered.  Obstetrics only strengthened his conviction that life begins at conception.

Sadly, sometimes even the best of care and the most effective medicines cannot prevent miscarriages.  In the early 1980’s my brother was in the midst of a one of those crisis moments with a young expectant mother, when something absolutely unexpected occurred.     Here is the incredible story.

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WHAT CHARLOTTE DISCOVERED IN CALIFORNIA

Charlotte Denson

Family stories are the best. Aunt Charlotte, my mother’s only sister and my granddaughter’s namesake, loves family stories as much as I do. Sometimes we laugh and carry-on during a phone call like nobody’s business!  I can seem to get Charlotte to laugh at almost anything, and we enjoy every moment of it.  When we’re not discussing politics, religion, or Auburn football, we are recalling and re-telling our family stories.  Aunt Charlotte and I are truly oral history junkies.

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MAYBELLE’S GRAVE

As a pastor, I am often called upon to conduct funeral services for members of our church family or for extended members of their families.  Every once in a while, I get a phone call from a local funeral home about a family who has no pastor, and am given the opportunity to come and minister to them.  It’s something I welcome, and know that it might be a divine appointment for a grieving family to hear about God’s love for them.

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TWO BROTHERS AND ONE MAD DOG

I am eternally grateful for the spiritual heritage and upbringing I received from my family.  Passed down to me and to my siblings was the truth about Jesus Christ, and a solid faith in His Word.  My parents took seriously the biblical admonition from Deuteronomy 11:19: “You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”

But spiritual precepts are not all that my family passed down to us.  Oral history is a part of the fabric of our family.  The following is another excerpt from a book I am presently penning about my late father, Coolidge Sims.  His last days in an assisted living center gave me a brief season to hear him again rehearse the stories of his childhood that I had heard all of my life.  One evening in June of 2012, I joined Dad for supper in the dining hall of his final residence, The Oaks.

Our conversation that memorable evening includes his version of one of my favorite family stories.  Enjoy!

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